In the article You're Leaving a Digital Trail by John Markoff, a study takes place and follows around a group of college students and tracks their every move through their mobile phones. I was a little thrown off at the creepy-factor in this article. Honestly, I know that the friendly faces at AT&T can track my every move with my iPhone, but it still freaks me out. The creepy-factor increases with the desire of the government to get in on this to find out where diseases start to stop them earlier. I think that idea is kind of cool, but there has to be a more private way to do this. The article states:
"The idea revolves around three principles: that you have a right to possess your own data, that you control the data that is collected about you, and that you can destroy, remove or redeploy your data as you wish" (Markoff, 2008).
Honestly, I appreciate the fact that I can control the data a little bit, but I shouldn't have to. I know within the last decade or so cell phones have rapidly increased in popularity. Everybody from a child to a senior citizen has one, and they have become increasingly more apt to do things like contain a GPS that uses your location to give you directions as well as provide you with instant updates to your e-mail accounts and social networking sites. This is great for society, but maybe not that great. By leaving this 'digital trail' we are losing our privacy and we really have no way to know what people can find out about us. By using these sensors in phones, people are able to spy on us and find out where we are and what we are searching for on websites like Google.
I suppose overall this article has made me aware that what we say and do over our cell phones is not as private as we may think. I will say in closing, that this make me laugh at the idiots who send naked pictures of themselves to other people. The owner of the other phone may not be the only one who saw that!
Nothing is ever private anymore. Someone can always find something on you, and that is why this article freaked me out a little bit. I guess I always knew that things weren't private but this really showed me how open we are to everybody. This linked with the article on Facebook and Twitter really makes me think about why my parents didn't want me online when I was a kid.
ReplyDeleteWhile I was reading this I thought it would be a good supplemental article to use if you were teaching a unit on privacy. It kind of freaks me out that someone could find out so much information about you like that. It made me think of cell phones like involuntary foursquare check-ins.
ReplyDeleteI just got a new phone and realized my battery was dying so quickly, so I took it in to get looked at, and found out that my cellphone was not only constantly finding itself with gps, but also connecting to wifi networks, and synchronizing itself with my online accounts. It was royally freaking me out. I figured out how to shut these options off, but like you said, Katie May, I shouldn't have to shut them off.
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